Author Archive

It’s 2010, and for the first time in history, a female filmmaker won an Oscar for Best Directing. Mind you, we’ve had four women total ever be nominated, so it’s tough to win when you’re not even in the race.

We look on TV and see an abundance of women: Desperate Housewives, The Closer, Damages, Weeds, I could go on. We look at the box office and we see films like Sex and the City and Twilight, which had the highest grossing opening for a film by a female director ever. Even when it comes to comics and heroes, we were given Buffy.

We saw a woman create one of the most influential digital commentary sources, The Huffington Post, and Felicia Day now tweets to almost 2 million followers due to the success of a web series she created called The Guild, which is now sponsored by Microsoft.

All of this leads us girls to believe that we are being taken seriously and our tastes matter. It also points to the fact that we do know our way around this thing called the internet, so why is it still so hard to find female programming online? As the creator of the web series, Downsized, I know this content is out there. I know it’s dramatic and poignant and hysterical and smart and appropriately estrogen-ridden, but I also know that a majority of women have no idea where to find it.

And that’s not because we’re not socially connected. We tweet. We Facebook. We fool around on Youtube. We laugh at Funny or Die. We may even post a comment on a blog about it. What we don’t find is female-centric content.

As a member of the Writers Guild of America, East, I know there are many female digital writers and filmmakers that are actively part of the guild, so we are definitely making video and putting it out there, but it is our job to make sure you can find it. And in our socially connected world, it also our job, as women, to watch it, because as media becomes increasingly more digital, we still need to keep our place in the programming line-up.
____________________
Named “a fresh new voice” by NewTeeVee in 2010 for her work as writer/director/producer/star of the YouTube Official SeriesDOWNSIZED, Daryn Strauss has been profiled on TV Talk Radio, Script Magazine, and Web Series Network. The independently produced DOWNSIZED was recently invited to screen at the Cologne Conference in Germany, along with shows from HBO and MTV. Daryn is a vocal participant in the web series community and avid supporter of equal rights in programming content, so she is very happy to provide a home for online content geared for women, Digital Chick TV (www.digitalchicktv.com). She has a second series in development.